Writing in airplanes again...

Watching the clouds from above them almost feels like watching the ocean waves roll in. Like you could balance on the wing, arms out and eyes so open and you could dip your toe into the soft. Like you could swirl it around slowly and turn it to spun.
I wish I could get in. Sink down to my shoulders and feel the breath dense in my lungs and float. Let my fingers go. There would be nothing to grasp for, anyway.
I am looking at the lights below me like bioluminescence and it is just the same. Sparkles created by creatures I am not fated to understand, but will forever see as beautiful and confused and illuminating their own paths, sometimes interrupted by the likes of messy me, waving my arms in an attempt to float. To stay at my shoulders. To stay where it is not so hard to breathe.


I just left my soul mates. I just boarded a plane without those hearts that beat the same way mine does. I watched for as long as I could until everything looked like sky and my eyes became too tired to strain.
Oh, Maho. Filling hearts to break them.

I have always felt sad to leave these people. I am famously terrible at goodbyes. I just can't handle the question of when. I can't handle that these people are not in my every day. That I am not in theirs. It is a grave injustice and it is not one I have ever been able to accept or let go of.

And how lucky we are to be so sad. Before you can feel emptier, you have to have known what full was.
Full is a blue cup. Full is sandy speakers and a yellow floatie. Full is a family chosen for you by the stars and by the boardwalks.

But full is this, too. This feeling of being so in love with a cluster of souls that the inevitable distance between you is almost physically painful. How lucky we are that we know the true capacity a person has just to love.

A Shift.

Some days, when the sky is falling in more ways than two, and your eyelids are being pulled to your heels by the gravity that refuses to give any part of you a break these days, some days like this, you sink. Or some days, you take a bath, long and steaming, droplets forming on your tired neck and tired temples, candles playing shadow games with porcelain.

And some days, you write.

A shift is happening. It's palpable, the way you can feel a potato bug unfurl in the palm of your hand when you have given him the time to be comfortable there. When you have given him the time to trust it there.
I used to need to wobble. I would search for hollow things that I could wear down and through until their centers exposed themselves as empty. And then I could move on without even shells to discard. That girl is still here. She still floats wishes on dandelion air and she breathes through her eyes and she craves new worlds. But I am noticing, so slowly, that she is beginning to quiet down.
Two years ago, I would have scoffed at that. "You're letting go of yourself! You're letting the real world tell you who you are! THEY ARE WINNING!!"
And maybe that's true. And maybe it's not. And maybe every wave you face doesn't have to be another one that knocks you to the ground because it's ok to be more inside a life than ankle deep.


I can say that to myself without believing it, or I can believe it without saying it until I can't even tell the difference. But it's probably true, anyway.

Only the Birds

In the mountains again. It is late morning, unless you would call it afternoon, in which case I would ask you to hand me my mimosa and let me live my life.

  All is essentially silent except for the birds, stretching their vocals for an early spring. I am kept company by two woodpeckers, one of whom is fairly inept at a what I imagine to be his only job. The other, in turn, seems to be a mighty show off. 

I can hear chipmunks cracking the hopes of seeds who only wanted to grow tall, or wide. Or beautiful.

The peaks in the distance still hold snow in their arms- a passive aggressive reminder that these tree limbs, pregnant with green buds, are still fragile and at the fickle mercy of the Rocky Mountain May.  The wind blows the cold like an exclamation point just in case you had been careless enough to forget. 

Perhaps the only way to be here is alone, if for no other reason than to listen to the birds. Only the birds. 

Airport rambling

What do you write when you have nothing to say? 

Do you describe your morning? 

  It's Easter and I'm sitting at a speckled Formica tabletop in a Nashville airport diner. I am early for my flight- enough time to have two bloody Marys. One more than I actually want. My waitress is sweet. Young, with plastic plumeria earrings, and she just wished me a happy Thanksgiving. Maybe she needs these drinks more than I do. 

Do you talk about the life you're going back to? My tiny apartment waits for me- missing someone who isn't sure she belongs there. I fill that space and I live that life never feeling completely filled myself. I have realized slowly that  you never really lose yourself, even if you're numb with happy hour and netflix. Losing yourself never applies. You allow yourself to go. Whether that is growth or degeneration is anyone's guess. 

Do you write about love?

If love is needing someone and you don't think you'll need anyone, is love lost on you? 

Maybe you write about your past, but God damnit, you spend enough time on your past- do you really want to spend ink as well? As if writing about it will quench the pining. As if anything will help. So you quietly acknowledge to yourself and no one else that those are skeletons and ghosts on that hill, and it's time to let go. 

You could talk about the beautiful things.  How Nashville was perfect as you watched one of your favorite souls marry his match. How the air felt like love and the sky was blue and the trees bloomed pink and white. 

  How you'll return to Denver one month before its own petals will cloak the city steam with yellow honeysuckle. 

  

You are in love there and maybe you miss that tiny apartment and stop thinking so much, James. Just remember to look at the stars and you'll be fine.